Guys - Jumpers from reputable vendors -such as Pasternack- will probably be better that you can make unless you have made thousands of connections! I have never had a Pasternack cable set fail - period! All cable assemblies from them were/are crimped. In TV broadcasting of old - video connectors were all PL-259 (at least until the mid 70's). We used solder connectors until crimp connectors came out. The failure rate from soldered connectors was inversely proportional the skill of the technician. Almost all failures were from poor soldering; and this is by broadcast maintenance engineers who soldered parts into equipment for a living! When we switched to crimp connectors, the short & long term failure rates diminished significantly - guessing - but probably 100 to a 1,000 times lower. We used UHF connectors outdoors as well, with about the same results. When TV switched to BNC connectors for video, we only used crimp type connectors. In a 1970s plant there would be about 500 to 1,000 cables in service. That is a large enough universe to get a feel for what worked & what did not. A plant in the late 90s will have thousands of video cables in service. We just did not have failures on crimped video cables. A crimped cable tends to be easier to make-up properly than a soldered one by the average technician. Analog video in a TV plant is tested from DC to about 10 MHz. Poor response and poor VSWR from bad connections will affect the video significantly. Poor ground connections will create all sorts of ground loops & all the problems associated with that phenomenon.
73 - George - AI4VZ -----Original Message----- From: mcduf...@ag0n.net On Mon, 11 Nov 2013 10:32:27 -0800, Jim Brown wrote: > Real hams don't buy pre-made coax cables, they make their own. Pre-made > cables are often made with cheap coax with junk connectors. And that > includes "big name" vendors who have big ads in QST and CQ. I'm sure you'll get some flak for that, but for the most part, I agree. ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
